


we all float on

by drcalvin



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Community: 64damn_prompts, M/M, Post-Seine, introspective, lesmiseres
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-05
Updated: 2014-04-05
Packaged: 2018-01-18 07:44:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,429
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1420123
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/drcalvin/pseuds/drcalvin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Javert has had two epiphanies in life. The first made him, the second almost ruined him.</p><p>Now, he is slowly having a third.</p>
            </blockquote>





	we all float on

**Author's Note:**

  * For [tvglow](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tvglow/gifts).



When the foundations of an ordered world were torn up by the roots every soul would stumble and fall, be it the soul of grand nations or petty humans. Only by clinging to the things eternal, the great immovable truths, could any creature hope to avoid falling into the abyss.

This insight in itself was perhaps true, but by no means enough to save a soul. Javert had lived his life according to the principles of the eternal, and though his world had shattered twice and he had grown rootless and lost with age, he had not given up his search for a final firm handhold in the tumultuous world.

The first realization had come upon him slowly, when he as a child looked around himself and saw the filth and misery that was his birthright. He was not alone—many a youth on the cusp of manhood has seen the injustice of the world, and vowed to carve his own share of riches from the rich fruits dangling just out of his reach. But Javert saw the drunkards raise the bottles to their mouths, saw the hungry stuff their bellies whenever they had the chance, and saw his elders by only a few years fall into the gaping maws of that great tearing, grinding, beastly thing: the Law.

And in his mind, there formed an image of this law: a law which chewed eternally on the sinful and the dispossessed, which separated the chaff from the true seed to let the mill-stones of society grind fruitfulness, pure and pale as the baker's flour. 

To this law, Javert moulded himself. He strained always to remain pure lest he stain the white flour with his filthy past. He saw in the law the origin and perpetration of order. To the law alone he held. If it changed, if it was rewritten—who was Javert, its tool, its sieve among the filth of society, to protest? He was on the cusp of being dragged down, with only his vigilance to protect him. The law remained: an order, an eternal truth. What it dictated mattered to Javert far less than that it was.

The second realization came upon him quickly, in the madness and despair of a single night: a realization of the blackness of the world and the abyss of his soul. He choose to cleanse it by diving into the final blackness—the Seine, that great open sewer of Paris—and when a hand held him back, he beheld the white hairs on it with a terror beyond language.

That was in the night of despair. But, as Javert the child had sought out a foundation to build his self upon and found it in the vastness of the law, Javert the man attempted to build his tentative sense of this—this ungraspable, this pitiable terrible thing which contained no written orders and changed from day to day—this, which they told him was Mercy.

He could not understand it in full. So be it; he could not understand the law when he decided to be its tool. He could not see when kindness was needed, when firmness was permitted, nor when he should give or take, forgive or follow. 

It did not matter overmuch to him if he understood. 

There had come, with that callused hand with its knotted veins and multiple scars all recording a heavy life, another source of purity into his life. And that light came from the man whose hair was white as pure flour, whose eyes were shadowed and yet shone with life, and whose soul was an eternal wellspring of goodness. 

Javert had tried to make this man of many names his idol; he had been struck down for false worship. He had tried to make him his law, only to learn that even if innocent by the highest court, the word disturbed the man and so Javert refrained from speaking it. He had made him an ideal to follow, although he found the edicts incomprehensible and the clauses far more confusing than any Code of Justice he had previously known. 

Perhaps it was due to this confusion more than anything else that he dared reach out—for his new foundation was a mere man, after all, and this man waned like the moon when the child he worshipped like a sun moved on to another sphere. Thus, when the white hair no longer reminded Javert of driven snow but of the white of bones in an empty crypt, he dared take steps he had previously never contemplated. 

In doing so, Javert came upon the cusp of his third epiphany. It was the first in which he did not feel his world shattering beneath this new truth. With an act that called chaos into the ordered little world he had built around himself and the white-haired man, he dared challenge the one truth he had never dared challenge before: that the absolutes he so longed for, might be as fickle as the human spirit.

Slowly, Javert sank into a world far different from any he had ever known. There were no eternal constants to hold on to when words gave way for touches; skin against skin, coarse fingers against the pulse-point beating with such vitality beneath aged skin. Language did not fit between bodies close enough to scent the rising warmth of skin or taste the silent reprimands of a scarred past. 

There were fumblings, new attempts, failures—some too painful to recall—but also, rising within them both, the desire to search out how high this mad avarice might lead.

For that it was avarice, Javert did not doubt. He, who had never thought to touch another, to possess or hold in that way, now found his gaze fixed in a different way, found his thoughts grow base and found, most shameful of all, that he wished to be beheld with the same desire in return.

Madness it was, in that the soul he had thought eternal and just, appeared to be far less—or endlessly more? A man of flesh and blood, a man crippled by loneliness and abandoned by those he loved. A man who, although he startled and grew wary, asked also for more. Be it touches, looks, clumsy words or any of the dozen other little mercies two men long battered by the world could give each other, they both learned how to dare. To ask, to accept, to share.

It was not eternal.

Words were unreliable. Touches were flighty, some leaving burning brands that left Javert squirming for more, while others left him fleeing in shame—at his desire, or clumsiness, or both. The steps of it all, the pace and twists and turns and all the mapless roads he dimly wished to follow—if there was anything eternal in this folly, it was only in how man insisted on repeating it again and again.

And yet that first hesitant touch of his hand… Javert's hand, the Inspector's, a hand that knew too much sternness. When it came upon the hand that had known too much contempt, that now shrank back from the world as were it full of thistles and ash alone, and still dared to wait—a moment, a fearful, courageous moment, to wait and learn his intentions.

From that moment on, Javert sensed the sweet promise of a delightful garden beyond all things he had previously known.

Not of justice did they speak when they sat indecently close with their legs pressed against each other despite the blazing hearth. Not to the great mills and factories of the world did Javert's mind wander when he looked upon those lips and heard not the words they uttered, only ached in shapeless ways to touch them. No, to the lightless night where something beyond worth or use could gleam, his mind would wander.

Not to the eternal did his desire reach, not even when finally they came together, but to the fleeting moment when touch was language and the same song of delight played through their bodies.

And finally, Javert heard what that dear, fallible voice had tried to tell him over years and years of fruitless hunt: That to be allowed to be fully human—with all the tangles and flaws of flesh and soul, the whirls of desire and multitude of mistakes, —was the sole mercy they had to give each other, these two old souls dimming against the canopy of cold eternity, their years running out and their loneliness fading at the end.

**Author's Note:**

> I had terribly problems coming up with a plot for this, and finally found my inspiration in a few words from 64damn_prompts - which I also ended up picking as the title.
> 
> I hoped it was a little bit like what you wanted <3


End file.
